Anonymous street artist, STIK, posing in front of one of his murals created to raise money for Homerton Hospital.
STIK is a British graffiti artist whose alias comes from his signature stick figure creations, and who once said he wanted to “turn the art world on its head”. In many ways, he’s succeeded; over the past 15 years or so, he’s steadily risen to prominence with his minimalist, linear artwork which tackles social issues and inequality in a deceptively simple way.
STIK’s newfound fame has had a profound influence on the prices his work fetches; his prints account for 82% of his work sold at auction, with the majority fetching between £1,000 and £5,000, and a significant number reaching up to £50,000.
Below is a list of STIK’s five most expensive prints sold at auction. If you own a STIK print, and you’d like to find out more about how much it might be worth, or how to sell it, get in touch with Mark Littler today.
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Liberty
In 2013, STIK unveiled a 60-foot mural in Tompkins Square, New York, titled Liberty. The mural’s giant stick figure raises its right hand in a universal gesture of resistance, and its pose also echoes that of New York’s iconic Statue of Liberty. As with most of STIK’s work, the location of the mural is important, too; Tompkins Square has long been a site associated with civil disobedience and activism, with some of the most well-known events being the 1874 worker’s riot and the 1988 housing riot.
The Liberty screenprints series was made the same year as the mural, and it features five screenprints of the same proud, empowered stick figure on different coloured backgrounds. Like much of STIK’s art, the prints are a comment on social injustice and “the persistence of community, but also its frailty.” Even individual Liberty prints regularly sell well at auction, and this set of five was sold by Christie’s in September 2019 for £160,000, far exceeding its £80,000 to £120,000 estimate.
Gdansk 16
This Giclée print was also based on a mural created by STIK, this time in the city of Gdansk, Poland, in 2011, the year of his first gallery show, which he prepared for whilst living in St Mungo’s hostel. After painting his solo mural in Gdansk, the artist also created a second mural in collaboration with young artists from the local community. Both artworks were painted onto metal shipping containers, but unbeknownst to STIK, in 2014, each of them went missing.
They reappeared in Lamberty Gallery in London, but they’d been severed into different pieces, and some sections had already been sold for thousands of pounds. STIK publicly condemned the sale of the mutilated murals, and there followed several years of negotiations, campaigning, and investigation. Finally, in 2019, the mural created with the local artists was recovered and returned to Gdansk, much to the delight of the community.
The remaining pieces of STIK’s solo mural, however, were destroyed by the artist, who filmed himself spray painting over them and uploaded the video to YouTube. The Gdansk 16 screenprint was based on one of the fragments of his original mural, and it was sold by Dreweatts in January 2021 for £80,000.
Gdansk 16 sold by Dreweatts in 2021
Onbu (Piggyback) (Pink, Grey, Blue, Green)
STIK once said: “I lived in Japan for almost a year in my late teens and picked up this style of drawing, which is closely connected to writing as a shorthand for conveying emotion.” His interest in Japanese art and calligraphic characters (known as kanji) helped him hone his own unique style, and it is visible in much of his work today.
The Onbu (Piggyback) prints were inspired by The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō, a series of ukiyo-e woodcut prints created by the Japanese master, Utagawa Hiroshige. STIK created the prints as a collaborative project with the Hiroshige Museum in Tokyo, and he chose deliberately muted background colours in homage to the original woodcuts. STIK’s four prints were sold by Christie’s in September 2022 for £70,000.
Onbu (Piggyback) (Pink, Grey, Blue, Green) sold by Christie’s in 2022
Lovers
Embracing figures are often central in STIK’s work, including in Big Mother, his London mural which held the record for being the tallest in the UK until it was demolished in 2018. Unlike much of STIK’s art, however, the Lovers print has few overt political messages; instead, the entwined, genderless stick figures are a pure and simple celebration of love. Once again, the print was based on a mural STIK created to oppose the local council’s clampdown on a London squat which, according to the artist, “was a safe house for people from oppressive regimes.” The print on a yellow background was sold by Christie’s in March 2022 for £45,000.
Lovers sold by Christie’s in 2022
Book (Orange) and Book (Mint Green)
In 2015, STIK published a book featuring photographs of his numerous street murals, alongside text giving details about the artworks. The book itself has become highly sought after, partly because each first edition was accompanied by an exclusive foldout STIK lithograph in different colours. These two prints were sold by Christie’s in October 2019 for £38,839; according to the auction house, the two “deluxe” screenprints were “intended to be released alongside the launch [of the book] but [were] not completed in time. The artist since destroyed the screenprint edition and the few impressions that survive are extremely rare.”
Book (Orange) and Book (Mint Green) sold by Christie’s in 2019
